1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to image editing devices.
2. Related Art
Various image reading devices such as image scanners generally are connected to a so-called computer device such as a personal computer through a wired or a wireless connection and the like, and transmit an image that was read from an original document to the computer device as image data. The computer device receives the image data that have been transmitted from the image reading device and stores those data on a data memory device such as various memories or a hard disk drive. At this time, on the computer device the image data that have been sent from the image reading device are subjected to processing such as various adjustments.
Examples of adjustment processing that may be performed at this time include histogram adjustment for adjusting the contrast of the image and density correction for partially altering the expression of darkness and lightness in the image. These adjustments may by executed automatically, or executed by a user or the like, by various programs, such as a driver program of the image reading device or application program and the like that are installed on the computer device. In addition to this, various methods have been proposed for the adjustment methods, editing methods, and various adjustments and the like that are executed on the image that have been read by the image reading device.
However, when a user would like to adjust the image to a desired color tone, even if the adjustment methods, the editing methods, or the various adjustments such as the histogram adjustment or the density correction are available, the user is forced to select an appropriate adjustment method from among these and then, through trial and error, use that adjustment method to perform suitable adjustment in order to change to the desired color tone. Thus, the case where it is extremely difficult for the user to change to a desired color tone was common. In particular, this required an immense amount of work for the users who were not experienced in adjusting the color tone and the like.
In particular, each of the adjustments such as the histogram adjustment and the density correction that are performed here are generally executed in a predetermined order on the image from the image reading device. Specifically, for example, in one case the histogram adjustment is executed on the image from the image reading device and then density correction is executed, whereas conversely, in another case the density correction is executed initially and then the histogram adjustment is executed, and thus there are various orders in which the adjustments may be executed. For this reason, depending on the adjustment processing for adjustment that the user adopts, there were cases in which problems such as overflow occurred which prevented the information of the original image from being utilized fully, or caused the smooth gradation to be lost and the like.
Also, in the cases where the user wants to select a desired color when adjusting the color tone, it was not easy for the user to search for a desired color based on an existing color, and it was extremely difficult to adjust the color tone smoothly.